The Aesthetic Dimension: Towards a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics by Herbert Marcuse (review)

Books 71 vegetables from a field using a horse than using a £5000 tractor. Unfortunately, the author's enthusiasm permits him to overstate the case so that, for example, he forgets that touch is a sense (p. 43) and he alleges energy cannot be defined. When he refers to one hamburger needing 7141 miles of lorry travel, he erroneously infers that a whole industry exists to supply each hamburger. On page 44 the statement is made that I Ching is a book! Despite these defects (and the many irritating grammatical errors), a consistent case is made for entering upon a smallscale agrarian existence. Ways in which Pedler has tried to act upon the principles enunciated in the first section form the second part. The third is recapitulation with a looking forward to a Gaiain philosophy. I should like to know the basis for including Shakespeare among vegetarians (p. 48). If this were so, why did he poach deer? The Aesthetic Dimension: Towards a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics. Herbert Marcuse. Beacon Press, Boston, 1978. 88 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Berel Lang" Even in his writing that addressed other themes, Marcuse did not deny the importance of the arts; but in this his last book published before his death in August, 1979, one finds him for the first time making the arts central to his continuing analysis of political and social structures. This step has both personal and conceptual significance in the development of Marcuse's thought. On the personal side, he alludes to the 'element of despair inherent in this concern': One need not be unsympathetic to his earlier call for social change (in his role, for example, as patron of the near-revolution in France in 1968) to recognize that a turn towards the arts for their 'transcendence' (Marcuse's term) also suggests a turn away from the radical praxis of political action that occupied him in such works as One-Dimensional Man and An Essay on Liberation. To be sure, he claims that privatization and an emphasis on subjectivity, as those are often seen as conditions of aesthetic experience, have been basic elements in Marxist thinking, with 'the freedom and happiness of the individual' (p. 69) the goal of its eventual revolution. But even if this were so (and many readers of Marx would object to this interpretation), the fact remains that Marcuse, in speaking of a nonpolitical end that either replaces or simply takes for granted the complexities of political action, might well be charged with a failure of nerve. Whether this charge is well-founded or not, his last book must be addressed on its own terms-not so much in its specific conclusions (which are not, in any event, specific enough) but in its formulation of a number of issues that have been both persistent and recalcitrant in Marxist thinking. One of these I have already mentioned, namely, the question of what the quality of human experience will be once the expectations of radical political change have been fulfilled. Marx himself said little about this question, and later writers (for example, Lenin in The State and Revolution) focused almost exclusively on the material differences that the revolution would bring about-in the way people would live, not in their lives as experienced. It is Marcuse's contention that the principal opposition in individual human experience between 'Eros and Thanatos' (pleasure-directed instinct and death instinct) (he builds still on the Freudian underpinning from his Eros and Civilization) will persist even after the political Revolution, and that the one means of overcoming that opposition and its psychological costs, then as now, is through the arts. (The claim that the arts are unique in this power is asserted, not argued.) The second important theme that Marcuse takes up is the status of the arts as a social institution. That status has been a continuing problem for Marxist thinking. On the one hand, the arts can hardly be excused from their place in history, "Dept. of Philosophy, University of, Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06268, U.S.A. where they are evidently produced and consumed by the same social forces that affect other institutions; on the other hand, certain writers...